Catheters find their use in many different medical applications, such as urinary catheters for bladder drainage. Each catheter is normally pre-packed in a receptacle by the manufacturer, in order to maintain the catheter in a clean and preferably sterile condition.
A urinary catheter in general need to have a lubricant applied to the outer surface thereof to facilitate insertion into the urethra. Especially, for lubrication purposes, a hydrophilic urinary catheter may have a hydrophilic outer surface coating or layer which should be wetted by a fluid such as water for a certain time period prior to insertion of the catheter into the urethra of a patient. In order to facilitate the use and to improve cleanliness of the catheter, the assemblies have in recent years developed to comprise a rupturable wetting fluid pouch or container as well. Such assemblies are disclosed in e.g. WO 97/26937, WO 01/43807 and WO 98/11932.
However, a common problem for most known catheter assemblies is that they are rather complicated to handle. For example, the handling requires normally opening the sealed package by peeling or tearing, introducing a wetting fluid into the package by pouring water into an opening or opening a wetting fluid container already present within the package, holding the package during the activation period, which is typically about 30 seconds, extracting the wetted catheter and introducing it into the urethra, and all preferably without spilling the released liquid. Further, it could also be necessary that the catheter is reintroduced into the package after use for disposal of the catheter. This could naturally be difficult for any patient, and for the patients being e.g. paraplegics or disabled, the task becomes particularly demanding. Further, water on the receptacle surface or on the patients fingers normally makes the receptacle slippery, which makes proper handling even more problematic.
In order to facilitate the handling of the catheter assemblies, it has been proposed in the art to use a small area of sticky adhesive on the outer surface of the receptacle, close to one of the corners. Said sticky adhesive is during storage protected by a protective sheet. In the use situation the sheet is removed, and the adhesive could then be used for holding the receptacle onto a wall or the like. Such catheter assemblies are e.g. disclosed in WO 03/064279 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,895,374.
However, in practice these known measures have proven insufficient and inadequate to effectively alleviate the above-related handling problems. Still further, the protective sheet need to be small and relatively firmly adhered to the sticky adhesive in order not to fall off involuntarily during production, storage and transportation. However, this requirement makes the operation of removing the protective sheet upon use in itself a rather tedious and cumbersome task for the user. Further, there is still an unavoidable risk that the protective sheet will fall of unintentionally. If this happens during production, which it in practice often does, it will normally result not only in damaged products, but also in significant disturbances in the production process and contamination of the production site, which of course incurs greater production costs etc. Accordingly, a proper compromise between an adequate fastening of the protective sheet and an easy removal of the same has proven difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
Accordingly, there is still a need for an improved catheter assembly which alleviates the above-discussed problems of the prior art.